October 08, 2025
Court Declines to Serve as “Super-Personnel Dept” in Same-Race Harassment Case
The judge describes this case as one “with a difficult societal question about who should be allowed to say which words in a workplace. But to answer that question would require this Court to appoint itself as a ‘super-personnel department….” The court declines to do so.
What happened? A black male employee, after an apparently frustrating but fairly innocuous conversation with a white male co-worker commented under his breath, using the “n-word” twice. A black coworker overheard the comments and reported them to HR. The employee admitted to his use of the “N-word” and was fired on that basis.
The judge gets it, in part, writing, “If Plaintiff is frustrated by his termination, that frustration is understandable. By all accounts, he allowed himself to become irritated by an innocuous conversation with a co-worker with whom he was friendly, and used a word that, for him, may well be entirely in-bounds in many other social circumstances. Losing a job at which one was performing well for one bad moment would doubtlessly feel harsh to anyone.”
But that’s where the congruity ends. The judge continues, “It is an absurdity to claim…that Title VII…effectively enshrine[s] a right for any person to use any slur which applies to their own protected characteristic in the workplace. The results of such a rule would be impossible to apply. How is a manager to know whether the person who just used an anti-Semitic slur is Jewish, or who used a homophobic slur is homosexual? The questioning required to get to the bottom of
those sorts of determinations would be sure to lead to more discrimination, not less.”
Bottom line. Professional conduct begins with workplace civility by everyone towards everyone, regardless of protected status. Remind all employees – staff and managers – to not assume a person who is a member of the same protected class – age, race, sex, sexual orientation, religion, etc., has the same tolerance or sensitivity as they have to particular behaviors, actions, words, etc.
